Big Game, Big Election

A lot has changed in New Orleans during the past four years. But even the most hardened Crescent City dwellers are feeling a bit shell-shocked by the past forty-eight hours.

This town erupted last night after the Saints won the Super Bowl, defying the predictions of many naysayers and doubters—including one at this magazine. The party wasn’t just in the French Quarter, despite all those televised reports from Bourbon Street. On Magazine Street, the shabby-chic commercial strip that runs through the city’s prosperous Uptown neighborhoods, people poured out of bars and into the streets. The area is definitely not the heart of the city, even though that’s how the Saints’s heroic quarterback Drew Brees described it in an interview with Katie Couric before the game. (Of course, as far as I’m concerned, anything Brees says is true and anything he does is just fine.) Still, even in this part of town, the night was on fire. Crowds blocked the streets at every corner. Traffic backed up; horns blared. The only consistently discernable words were “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints!” Near the corner of Napoleon Avenue, an impromptu second-line formed behind a rag-tag brass band. A one-legged woman danced in the middle of the street, leaning on her walker. A man danced on top of a bus; the bus driver was dancing inside.

Outside the Rendezvous Tavern, where I watched the game, the scene was akin to that on the streets of the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn on the night that Barack Obama was elected President. Crowds of young, mostly white people—many of them transplants to New Orleans, like me—danced and celebrated, genuinely joyful, but perhaps a bit uncertain about how much ownership they should claim. They hadn’t waited forty-two years, and most of them probably hadn’t lived through hell to see this day. Still, it was hard not to notice the way white and black Saints fans called out to each other, embraced each other, shouted in unison. An SUV full of young black women rolled past the corner of Magazine and Sixth Street with its windows down, every occupant (including the driver) with her head out the window, screaming, “Who dat!” Their car was swarmed by college-age white kids.

A police siren wailed—never a good sign in New Orleans. But as the cruiser approached the window rolled down and a Saints banner was unfurled. The crowd erupted. It was probably the first time those cops had ever got a reception like that. I can only hope that sort of thing also happened downtown, in Treme or the Ninth Ward.

The Saints’s triumph overshadowed the (arguably) more important development of this weekend. On Saturday, the city elected a new mayor: Mitch Landrieu, a member of the Louisiana political dynasty sometimes called the Cajun Camelot. He will become the first white person to hold the office since his father, Maurice “Moon” Landrieu, who served from 1970 until 1978. Landrieu was the frontrunner from the moment he belatedly entered the race, but his landslide victory came as a surprise to just about everyone. He won sixty-six per cent of the vote, including an estimated sixty-two per cent of the black vote, avoiding what many feared would be a racially divisive run-off. The second-place finisher was Troy Henry, an African-American management consultant. In a show of unity, Henry appeared at Landrieu’s victory party. “I think Mitch was the leading black candidate,” Henry told the Times-Picayune.

Landrieu’s appeal to “crossover” black voters was aided by his family’s legacy. As mayor during the turbulent nineteen-seventies, Moon Landrieu helped to desegregate civic life in New Orleans, creating a racially diverse administration that opened City Hall to African-Americans for the first time and paved the way for the black and Creole power bases that have governed the city for the past three decades.

His son’s election caps a transformation in the racial balance-of-power in New Orleans that began after Katrina. In the years since the hurricane, the city’s demographics shifted, with the black population declining from nearly seventy per cent before the storm to around sixty per cent today. Partly as a result, the city council became majority-white for the first time in more than twenty years. A white district attorney was elected, and the city’s most powerful black politician—former Congressman William Jefferson, he of the freezer full of cash—lost his seat after being indicted on corruption charges. That string of losses significantly raised the stakes of the mayoral election for black New Orleanians. Landrieu’s decisive win suggests that most black voters decided that electing an experienced politician, or a known quantity, was more important than keeping “the Franchise,” as the mayor’s office is known in the African-American community.

The unity made manifest by the Saints’ victory will no doubt ease the path to Landrieu’s inauguration in May. But it remains to be seen how long this incredible moment will last. Amid the bliss, it’s worth remembering just how difficult the road ahead remains. The Saints won, but their city is still wracked by palpable inequities, staggeringly high crime rates, and a culture of political corruption that seems impervious to reform. Mitch Landrieu will be responsible for securing the physical and economic survival of New Orleans after its near-death experience, all the while trying to maintain a mandate to govern as a white mayor in a racially polarized, majority-black city. It’s not at all clear which of those two tasks will prove the hardest.